What is the best type of cat food?

Question

My kitty is 3 years old and I give her Iams, but I was wondering if there is a better food out there.

Answer 1

Neither Iams nor Science Diet is a good cat food. Both use by-product meat protein and 2/3 of their formulations are corn or another low-quality grain.

The best cat foods have the first two ingredients on the label as high quality meat protein and use fillers such as brown rice, millet, oats, or pea.

Look at Natural Balance, Felidae, Solid Gold (Katzen-Flocken), Chicken Soup for the Cat Lover's Soul, Felidae, CA Natural. Choose about three of those and rotate around with the different brands. Your cat does not need to have only one kind for her lifetime. Some of the ones mentioned have duck, turkey, lamb - if only chicken is used as protein a cat can develop allergies to it.

My cat on dry food gets them switched around all the time. When you first make a switch with a cat you need to do it gradually. Click on my name at the icon for a "recipe" for switching dry foods.

Answer 2

Chicken Soup For The Cat Lover's Soul is probably the cheapest of the good quality foods. Keep in mind that canned food should be the staple of a cat's diet. Dry foods are dehydrated and most of them contain too many grains and carbs for cats. Cats are obligate carnivores (they need to eat meat) and they need to obtain moisture from their diet, as they would do in the wild. Read labels and look for foods that contain real meat (not by-products) as the first ingredient. Fire io gave some good suggestions. If you are not able to feed your cat these top quality foods, the lowest I would go is Fancy Feast canned food. It at least contains real meat in most of the varieties. If your cat is going to have dry food as a snack, Wellness and Innova are good choices. They are excellent quality foods, and are the only good quality foods that my 5 cats will eat! Again, you could always try Chicken Soup For The Cat Lover's Soul. If you have no options other than Petsmart, try Blue Spa Select.

Answer 3

Supermarket brands such as IAMS , Science Diet, Purina Cat Chow, etcaren't good foods.They contain way to many cheap fillers & not enough meat.Cats are obligate carnivores.They are made to extract nutrition from meat not grain.It can take up to 3 times as much grain based foods for a cat to receive proper nutrition then it does a good meat based foods. Look for good quality foods with meat as at the very least the first 2 ingredients and that has no corn, wheat or soy.
Some good ones are Chicken Soup for the Dog Lover's Soul, Felidae, Wellness just to name a couple.

Answer 4

You can tell by checking the ingredients listing and the analyticals:

Ingredients: You want more meats to be the main ingredients. Cats are carnivores. Higher quality meat is better. For instance, "Chicken" is better than "Chicken byproducts" and that is better than "Chicken meal". Cats will generally prefer the taste of chicken byproducts - they like rank smelling poultry and fish. When you're looking at the ingredients, the first 5 or so ingredients are the most important. Most of the rest are going to be vitamins and minerals.

Analyticals: There is a gaurunteed analysis on the labels as well. The 2 main things are the protein and moisture. On wet food, the moisture will be around 80% and that's a pretty good number. If it's substantially higher, they're selling you too much water. Dry food moisture is something like 12%......Check the protein- this is more telling than the moisture. On wet food I think it's common to be around 9%. Dry food I believe is in the 30s. The level of protein is effected by the quality of meats used (meat generally has more protein than organs and such), and the amounts (the more fillers such as corn meal that are used, the lower the protein percentage will be).

I'll be clear that I work for Purina -- but check around and you'll find that Pro Plan dry has the highest level of protein

Answer 5

Just look on the labels of the cat foods. You want something where the meat comes first in the ingredients. If it comes first, it is the most substance in the food. If preservatives etc comes first, it isn't a good food and mainly has fillers. I found Iams to be a good cat food. Science diet is also good, but it is quite expensive.

Answer 6

Iams is a good cat food. The cat food that works for my cats (they throw up with certain foods) is Purina One for Sensitive Systems. The Hairball Control Formula works well for my cats too. Iams and Science Diet are very good foods but both are pretty pricey. Purina One is a little bit cheaper and my cats seem to like it. Avoid the generic brands that are available in your area, you may as well have them eating cardboard.

Answer 7

Cats are obligate carnivores, so the best food would only contain animal products--no grains, or vegetables.

Answer 8

another good cat food is Veterinarian Hills Sience Diet Recomended Kitten Original

Answer 9

Our Vet recommends Science Diet.